Why Is English So Hard To Learn?

Learning a second language has always been a good idea but it was not always a practical thing to learn. These days, though, we have Language labs from Robotel technology on our side; and that means we can now study any language we want whenever it is most convenient for us.

And if you are going to learn a second language, English is an excellent choice. That’s not because English is the best language, necessarily, but it is among the most commonly spoken languages in the world. Roughly 500 million people speak English as a second language—arguably more than the number who speak it as a first language—and that is certainly saying something. After all, English is also not an easy language to learn, thanks to several learning challenges associated with things like grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary.

ENGLISH GRAMMAR

Without going into too much detail on this subject—and there is a lot—lets just say that English grammar is complicated; far more complicated than many other languages. Between varying types of sentence structures, verb conjugations, syntax anomalies, and other twists in grammar rules, the whole language can seem somewhat illogical to the non-native speaker. This, of course, makes it very hard to absorb all of the rules.

VOCABULARY

Grammar is probably the most difficult thing for a non-native English speaker to learn, and then that would be followed by vocabulary. You see, English has Germanic roots, but belongs to the same Indo-Euro language family as the Romance languages. As such you are going to find a lot of Romance language cognates but a dissimilar verb conjugation. When you take into account the massive linguistic variation between all of the regional slangs and dialects and it is quite easy to see how English vocabulary may not be everyone’s cup of tea.

SLANG

One specific reason English vocabulary is so difficult has much to do with regional dialect, colloquialisms, and slang. While these are second nature to the native speaker—in so many ways—they can be quite hard for a foreigner to track.

PRONUNCIATION

Finally, English is hard to learn because the language is neither phonetic nor it is it immediately intuitive. Sure, a native speaker knows the difference between “thought and taut and though and enough” but someone learning the language is really going to struggle with these rules, at least in the very beginning.